


The Landscapes of the Dead

by togethertheyfightcrime



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017)
Genre: Ahch-To, Canon Compliant, Child Abandonment, Child Neglect, Coming of Age, Desert, Dreams, Dreams and Nightmares, Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker, Force Ghost Obi-Wan Kenobi, Force Ghosts, Force Sensitivity, Force Visions, Gen, Identity, Jakku, Pre-Canon, Pre-Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Prophetic Dreams, Prophetic Visions, References to Canon, Self-Discovery, The Force, Young Rey, details of jakku were kindly provided by the wookiepedia, scavenging, the author has never actually seen a desert
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-07-11
Packaged: 2018-11-30 22:19:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11472807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togethertheyfightcrime/pseuds/togethertheyfightcrime
Summary: Rey is a scavenger. It’s what she made of herself: she finds what was left behind and gives it new purpose. She fixes broken things so they can live a little longer. Nothing is ever the same as it was before it was lost – but, Rey knows, if you put two lost things together you can create something new. You can build something better.





	The Landscapes of the Dead

**Author's Note:**

> "They cannot scare me with their empty spaces / Between stars - on stars where no human race is. / I have it in me so much nearer home / To scare myself with my own desert places.”
> 
> -Robert Frost, _Desert Places_

She is eight when they leave her. 

 

* * *

 

There used to be forests on Jakku. Sometimes Rey sees them when she sleeps: the endless spans of green. The waters deep as canyons. The skin of the planet alive and thriving. Then something terrible happened to the world – no one knows what – and Jakku was scorched, made barren, burnt into a waste where nothing lived, only survived.

 

* * *

 

For the first few cycles on Jakku she lives with Unkar Plutt. He is neither kind nor gentle, but when Rey is hungry, she gets a portion, and when nights hang bitter over the desert, she gets a blanket.

 

“You pay me back by growing into the best damn scavenger at Niima Outpost,” Unkar tells her, after loudly proclaiming how much Rey will owe him as soon as she becomes useful.

 

Rey is smart enough to know why Unkar intends for this to happen. If Rey is the best scavenger, then she brings Unkar the best salvage, and Unkar makes the most credits. He sees something in Rey, yes – Unkar’s rule over his patch of desert was built because of his skill for recognizing forgotten things that can be reshaped for a use. It’s not fondness that makes him warn the other scavengers and thieves off Rey’s back when she starts salvaging; it’s good business sense. She’s an investment in Unkar’s future profit. 

 

The funny part is that Rey knows all this and still grows the littlest bit fond of Unkar, who spends Rey’s first cycle on Jakku proclaiming archly that he might sell her to a moisture farm for hard labor. 

 

“Selling people's 'gainst the law in the New Republic,” Rey tells him solemnly. 

 

Unkar laughs so deep his ale tub sloshes. “Funny girl. Thinks the New Republic gives a bloggin’s arse what goes on in Jakku.”

 

“Why wouldn’t they?”

 

“Because they don’t have to, do they? Nobody cares unless you make them. Don’t you forget it.”

 

Rey thinks about that for a second, then scowls. “Then you better not sell me or I’ll make you care you did.”

 

This time, Unkar doesn’t laugh – he grins till the fat of his cheeks rolls high up his face. “You’ll make me regret it, eh? Not too bad, girl. You just try your best.”

 

* * *

 

Unkar Plutt sends her scavenging in the most dangerous ruins, wrecks that can barely withstand the brush of a breeze. Nobody cares unless you make them. Rey knows that for any of her potential she’s not yet worth enough for Unkar to care if she lives or dies. 

 

“He says,” Rey grunts into the emptiness as she climbs the skeletal rafters inside an old cruiser, “that for someone smaller than a skittermouse I eat enough to choke the Sinking Fields. That’s why I gotta start bringing in salvage for portions now. Otherwise Unkar will have nothing to trade and is that how I thank him for taking me in when I got left?”

 

There’s a sharp creak in the rafters that cuts into Rey’s very bones. It sounds like a voice, like a scream. Inside the wrecked cruiser, the world is shadow-dappled and dim. Dangling wires and loose beams weave shapes from the emptiness. Rey has not salvaged enough to trade Unkar for a rappelling kit; if fear loosens her hands she will fall and be lost until her bones are salvage too.

 

Between thundering heartbeats Rey imagines her parents' voices – imagines what she would want them to say to her, and hears it like a bell ringing clear in her head. _There are only dead things here. You are stronger than ghosts. You can survive_.

 

* * *

 

There was a town called Reestkii, some four hundred kilometers from Niima Outpost. It was near Jakku’s equator and all but empty. Barely enough grew to keep its settlers from starving. But Rey still listened whenever she heard the place’s name, because her mind was quick for languages and she knew how Reestkii translated into Basic: _the leftover_. A place just like her.

 

* * *

 

You dream strange things in a desert. Rey’s sleeping mind watches as the skeletons of ships she scavenges emerge from the ground, spilling sand, undoing time. Suddenly they are shining and terrible, and the sky is filled with war. It should scare her, but it doesn’t. Fighting makes her feel fierce, and when she’s fierce she’s never afraid.

 

She practices fighting in the ships’ empty bellies with a long staff like those light-swords from her dreams. The movements come to her with the ease of training Rey never had. At night asleep she sees how those swords glow to warm the whole desert. It’s snuffed by morning, but Rey knows what could be held in her sand-scraped fists. Something bright and burning. Something warm, and full of starlight.

 

* * *

 

The Teedos believe in a goddess called R’iia. She was full of anger, and her breath made storms. In her fury R’iia brought famine to Jakku, brought drought, brought battle and ships falling from the sky. One Imperial starship struck the ground with such heat that the sand around it became the Crackle, a field of black glass shattering beneath footsteps. 

 

But not Rey’s. In her smallness and swiftness she becomes wind on glass, flying where no feet can chase her.

 

* * *

 

Rey makes her home inside a downed AT-AT, away from Unkar Plutt and the outpost, when she is eleven. Or – she thinks she is eleven. The days wick away from her memories. There was the midyear eclipsing of Jakku's moons soon after she was – _left behind_ , she was left behind – so that's her mark: three eclipses, three meetings of moons, three years older. Rey starts scratching a line onto the AT's wall for every day that passes.  As if holding time’s mass in her mind will let her make sense of her long desertion. The span of years stretching to fill the desert. 

 

She can’t ever stray too far from the Niima Outpost. It’s where they left her, three eclipses ago – so it’s where they’ll come back, someday, and Rey will show them how faithfully she counted the days of waiting. _I always knew. I always knew you’d come back for me. Look, I counted every moment, because I knew you loved me too_. 

 

* * *

 

 Inside her home, she fixes things. She hoards the things she salvages that are too damaged to trade for portions, and she connects them with one another. She fuses metal. She hammers bent transparisteel flat. She replaces pistons, scrapes rust from iron, solders circuitboards. Everything broken can be made into something new. Everything can be rebuilt. Change is the order of the universe. So one day, Rey knows, change will come for her too. 

 

* * *

 

From a distance the downed walker looks like a carcass, some bent-legged animal stiff and dead in the sands. Everything on Jakku is long-dead: corpses from a time when Rey was not yet alive, relics of a history she salvages for survival. She doesn’t let herself think about that very often. Yet she feels like an interloper inside the immensity of the past, prying somewhere she does not belong just as she runs endlessly after a future where she belongs to her family again. Either way: Rey is rooted in her present, chained to her place.

 

* * *

 

There are nomads on Jakku. They wander through Niima Outpost every few cycles, sometimes carrying word of Tuanul down the ravine where some Force-church members had a town. (Their elder is called Lor San Tekka, one nomad tells Rey when they see how fiercely the girl listens. If you ever find yourself down there, ask for him.)

 

Rey lives and breathes on those stories: a town full of families, every one of them connected by a great power. The Force is everywhere, so no one can be lost. 

 

“It is real, isn’t it?” she asks Unkar Plutt one day, as he traded out rations in exchange for knockback nectar from Cratertown. She doesn't look at the alcohol; people who drink make her stomach twist. “The Force?”

 

He grunts behind his window. “Might be. Might not.”

 

“But there’s a whole _town_ for it.”

 

“There’s whole _wars_ for it, girl. Where’d you think our shipwrecks out there came from? The rest of the galaxy fought over their Force, and now we live off what they left.”

 

Rey stares at him. For all her dreaming, she’d never wondered. The Graveyard of Giants seemed to grow from Jakku itself, the way she dreamed that green things could.

 

“Either way, girl, there’s no Force down here. All we got is what we find. You ever found the Force out there?”

 

How can you find something, Rey wonders as Unkar shoos her from the window to make space for a rations queue, when you’re not sure what it is?

 

* * *

 

Out alone in the desert, things are less real. Wind spins fantastical figures from sand: twisters, spirals, dancers, grasping branches. Oases waver and fade in the hot distance. Sometimes Rey sees the shimmering outlines of strange ships on the horizon, upside-down and enormous. In the sand after lightning storms she finds fragile, hardened glass, fine-grained and grey. 

 

Once Rey watched, cross-legged atop a dune, as a whirlwind shaped like a serpent carved a dark, twisting trail upon the desert. The trail looked like the veins beneath Rey’s skin, where her blood pounded. Above, the arch of the sky stretched to such immensity that Rey knew it held all the universe, just beyond that haze of blue. 

 

“I’ll go there,” she tells the whirlwind. “I’ll go beyond the sky with my family, when they come.”

 

* * *

 

Alone by her AT-AT, Rey feels the hunger of the emptiness around her and gives it her words. The yawning distance swallows her voice and is never, ever filled. 

 

“Here I am,” says Rey. The desert listens. 

 

* * *

 

Sometimes when she’s out wandering alone, time seems to sink down into the sands. Heat shivers the desert around her and Rey sees ghosts, soft-edged and wavering like mirages, stealing between the sand dunes in streaks of shimmering blue. They never leave any footprints. 

Only some ghosts seem to see her – there's an old man in robes who smiles at Rey, sometimes. When she dares to follow them (the occasional ghost will try and lead her into collapsing ruins or the Sinking Fields: trickster spirits, easy to avoid), they lead her to good salvage. A ravine choked with crashed X-wings where she finds repulsorlifts for her speeder. A downed Y-wing’s computer, still functional enough to run flight simulations and display ship schematics. 

 

An AT-AT, sunk deeper than the one she’d made a home in, with crew skeletons still inside; Rey carries them out in pieces to bury beneath the sand. Later, a pale-haired boy's ghost brings her back to that AT-AT, then disappears when Rey looks up from a green spinebarrel flower pushing out of the desert sands.

 

One time, best of all, inside the wreckage of a single-seat starfighter the boy leads her to – a Rebel pilot’s helmet with _Captain Ræh_ written inside. 

 

My name, thought Rey, or close enough. She had forgotten how her family spelled her name. Rey knew the helmet was for her: the first and only thing she remembered being given.

 

Without thinking, she yelled, “ _Thank you!_ ” to the sun-stained horizon. Only silence echoed back. But when Rey dropped her huge helmet over her ears and stood, the boy was still there. Smiling at her like he’d just raced for his freedom and _won_.

 

(Why did I think that, Rey wondered.)

 

* * *

 

Rey wears the helmet when she practices flight simulations. Sometimes it feels like she can half-remember what it was to be Dosmit Ræh, starfighter captain, leader of a squadron, and that almost-memory guides Rey through the Y-wing computer’s flight simulations until there isn’t a ship in the galaxy Rey couldn’t bring through the sky.

 

“This is Captain Rey of the Tierfon Yellow Aces,” she calls from under her helmet, flying a computerized X-wing like Captain Ræh’s from inside her AT-AT.

 

“This is Captain Rey from _Hellhound 2_ , calling on all Rebel frequencies,” Rey says to no one. “Come in, Resistance. Over.”

 

“Requesting clearance for landing on Jakku, this is Rey and her Yellow Aces. Do you copy?”

 

“I’m not receiving you, over. Please come in. Over.”

 

* * *

 

Rey fills scraps with sand and makes a cloth figurine of Captain Ræh, so both of them can be together. When she’s out scavenging, she tucks the little Ræh into her pack and whispers to her when no one can hear. Ræh becomes her desert: the thing that always listens. At night she tucks the little thing by her heartbeat and curls around it, trying to dream Dosmit Ræh’s dreams. The vast black shine of space. The impossible beauty of nebulas. Fighting for a cause. Having people behind you. Friends, allies, teams and family – a vocabulary of not being alone. The closer she holds Ræh to her, the closer Rey is to them. 

 

* * *

 

The water dreams start when she’s older – old enough to start binding her chest and bleeding from between her legs. 

 

(There are no other human females at Niima Outpost. The first few times it happened, Rey thought she was dying.) 

 

Her day-marks tally just over two cycles since she started living in her AT-AT, and she lived with Unkar for about three cycles before that – so she must be thirteen, or just about, mustn’t she? 

 

(But what about the days I forget to carve, Rey thinks, what about the lost time–)

 

Rey doesn’t know how long she’s been alone.

 

But there’s nothing more lonely than the water dreams. There’s a word for water like that – almost endless, enfolding a planet in liquid dunes that crash onto sand. Rey wakes up with sand in her eyes and imagines it’s from the – (shores, Rey thinks, how do I know that word) the place where the great water ends. There are only a few places like that on the planet from her water dreams. Those places are worn, bold rocks (island, says something that isn’t quite Rey, I land-) that jut out from the water like wreckage from the dunes. Something pulls her toward them. There’s some(one) thing there, something that needs to be found. 

 

She has to salvage what was lost. She has to save them. 

 

(Who, Rey begs her dreaming mind, but there is no answer, and she forgets by morning.)

 

* * *

 

_These are your first steps_.

 

* * *

 

There’s never quite a word for it, not on Jakku, but – later, when the only sands near Rey are the old grains caught beneath her fingernails, she tries to fit her memories inside this Force that’s claimed her. It’s easier than she wanted it to be. 

 

The way she could just _see_ how each component of a broken engine should fit together. Or how she always chanced to find good parts amongst the wreckage. How after stretches of poor salvage she still managed to convince Unkar to trade her enough rations to survive, when everyone knew Unkar Plutt was the cheapest banthafucker south of the Sinking Fields. The way the scattered languages of ragtag traders crossing through Niima would reassemble into sense inside her head. How Rey could always find her way back to the sun from within great labyrinths of wreckage that yearned to trap her inside their darkness.

 

Rey, you know her, scavengers would say to each other, that girl with the staff, she’s lucky. 

 

And her dreams, and the ghosts. Her dreams–

 

* * *

 

Rey was left, and never returned for – so she waited. To meet the future she had to survive, so she grew into a thing that did only that: survive, always. A true desert creature. Rey built herself from the wreckage of a child who was deserted into a woman who will not submit – not to death, nor to despair, and so neither to denial. 

 

So Rey asks herself: how much of the strength I earned is not my own? How much of my survival was because of the Force? Has this old magic been my crutch all along? 

 

Am I not that strength which kept me alive when I had nothing left to live for? 

 

* * *

 

And then she goes to find Skywalker. Luke Skywalker, the last Jedi, who might – just might – understand. It isn’t that Rey wants to be told what she ought to do or who she ought to become. But a suggestion wouldn’t hurt. An answer. A confirmation that she isn’t alone in this mystery. 

 

The questions sing in her mind like R’iia’s storms as she weaves an untraceable path across the galaxy to Ahch-To. _How much of me is not myself? What is my place in this old story? Am I beholden to this legacy? Out of all the universe, why is it me?_

 

“You think too much, little one,” rumbles Chewbacca. 

 

Rey wets her lips as hyperspace shimmers around them. She confesses, “I don’t know how to stop.”

 

“Funny,” Chewie says. “My last captain never had that problem.”

 

To laugh beside a friend is more miraculous than green.

 

* * *

 

This is my water-dream, thinks Rey, and then – the _sea_. It’s called a sea, that greatness of water. 

 

I see, thinks Rey, then the temple shimmers into her vision and – I land.

 

* * *

 

Stepping onto Ahch-To, clutched by that water-soaked air: it feels like the bending of stars into hyperspace. Not quite _here_ , not yet _there_ , and on the verge of that nothingness wound between the two. The past is echoing in every wave; the future is sketched by currents across the waters. Voices careen on the wind, as old as the forests that once wreathed Jakku. As new as a wind-carved dune.

 

Rey climbs the worn stair to the temple and her mind is –  _I know this place. I_ know _this place_. Old stone-songs echo through her feet. _This place knows me_. Is that the Force, then: to know someone before you see them? To recognize places you’ve never been? 

 

Old stone-songs echo through her feet, tangle in her bones, and threaded throughout them is the deep ache of Luke’s regret. His pain, his guilt. It grays the green of the little world. It could drown the oceans. 

 

_I should have saved them_ , moans the mountainside. 

 

_I fought so long for good_ , whispers a stone-stacked temple wall, _and it was all made into evil._

 

_We are all trapped in this legacy_ : a jagged crack within a step. 

 

Wind cut against a peak cries out, _I lost my charge to darkness and he killed all my children_. 

 

_All my children, all my children_. Rey sees them when she blinks: the bodies from her vision. The memory of the sword. The screaming. The weeping. They are why she cannot blame Luke for giving up while others fight. _All my children_. They never left but were taken away. Even the Force cannot express to Rey the weight of all those ghosts. 

 

But Rey is not a stranger to the landscapes of the dead. She clutches her staff and marches on.

 

* * *

 

Rey is a scavenger. It’s what she made of herself: she finds what was left behind and gives it new purpose. She fixes broken things so they can live a little longer. Nothing is ever the same as it was before it was lost – but, Rey knows, if you put two lost things together you can create something new. You can build something better. 

 

* * *

 

The lightsaber hangs in the air between them and Rey thinks, you are meant to be one who comes back. You are the one who comes back. I’m sorry you lost them. Everyone left me. But if you come with me then we won’t be alone anymore. We can fix what was broken, or come close enough. I think that’s what the Force is. To have the strength to try again. To never be alone.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm pretty sure I started this about 0.000001 seconds after I saw TFA and here we are now in the grand old year of 2017. This fic is 99% rampant abuse of wookiepedia (dear Lord is there a wealth of information on that site) and 1% typing as feverishly as I can in the wee hours while holding off sleep with pure force of will. "rey.pages" has been sitting in my computer, very obviously wanting for an adequate title, and quietly taking shape for a long while. So it's weird but exciting to finally post it. Comments and critiques are always appreciated. Thank you for reading!
> 
> Edit 17 December 2017: Just saw _The Last Jedi_ and loved the FUCK out of it; there's a few tiny changes to the fic to keep it in line with canon but overall I think it managed to stay joss-proofed. (I was really pleased with the revelation about Rey's parents, personally – but that's a whole 'nother story.)


End file.
